I have a Gateway GM5474 media center PC about 1.5 years old. It's loaded with Vista home premium. I only recently began to use the media center oriented features. The Windows media center works great for OTA HDTV, and the HDMI port on the graphics card diplays stunning video on a 40 inch flatscreen LCD (no HDMI audio though). The optical drive HOWEVER will not PLAY a full-featured DVD movie. It will play bonus feature DVDs, TV series DVDs and other simplistic home-made DVDs but not an actual movie. You can hear the drive make several attempts to load the DVD but it doesn't sound right. It has no problems with CDs. Windows media center says there is no DVD in the drive when you click on play DVD. Is this a software driver issue or hardware drive issue? How can the drive read some DVDs and not others. The drive does indicate DL capability on the front.

Thanks for any suggestions. I wouldn't MIND putting in a new drive if necessary but I'm kinda pised my so-called media center PC will not play a movie DVD. Did you try DIFFERENT player?well the DVD's in question all play fine in both of my regular DVD players.

I was playing around last night with different DVD's and found the computer will play certain movies and not others. Last Samarui, American Gangster, Gladiator all play fine.

Dances with Wolves, Master and Commader, Slience of the Lambs, and others will not load and Windows Explorer sees no DVD in the drive. It has to some type of copy protection issue. I believe Broni meant a player as in another media player on your PC...
DLoad, install and try it on VLC Player...FREE.oops, of course. yes I did download VLC and it works good with the same dvds. Like media center however, with the bad DVDs it doesn't even see the disk in the drive.Just to clarify these are Factory Produced movie DVD's ? ?Yes they are all factory. Did you try those "bad" DVDs in another computer?No, but that's a good idea. Tonight I'll try my neighbor's computer. Thanks